Nowadays, cloud computing has attracted the attention of large companies due to its high potential, flexibility, and profitability in providing multi-sources of hardware and software to serve the connected users. Given the scale of modern data centers and the dynamic nature of their resource provisioning, we need effective scheduling techniques to manage these resources while satisfying both the cloud providers and cloud users goals. Task scheduling in cloud computing is considered as NP-hard problem which cannot be easily solved by classical optimization methods. Thus, both heuristic and meta-heuristic techniques have been utilized to provide optimal or near-optimal solutions within an acceptable time frame for such problems. In this article, a summary of heuristic and meta-heuristic methods for solving the task scheduling optimization in cloud-fog systems is presented. The cost and time aware scheduling methods for both bag of tasks and workflow tasks are reviewed, discussed, and analyzed thoroughly to provide a clear vision for the readers in order to select the proper methods which fulfill their needs.
